Alex Usher, Vize-President von EPI, stellt bei der Begründung der Initiaive die Vorzüge des CHE-Rankings heraus: „The Centre for Higher Education Development has come up with a set of web-based “rankings” which are, for the moment, unique. As in other rankings, the CHE collects data on a range of indicators through student surveys and third-party indicators. Unlike other [rankings (d.R.)], they do not weight the indicators, nor do they aggregate them to create aggregate “winners”. Instead, users select the indicators on which they wish to “rank” institutions, enter them into the system, and the web-based server automatically creates a ranking of institutions according to the selected criteria. Even better, it’s done on a department-by-department basis.

Alex Usher in Aktion (Foto: D. Ausserhofer)

This, to my mind, is the future of rankings. It compares institutions at the level they should be compared at and it does so in a flexible way, not according to some pre-ordained, one-size-fits all weighting formula handed in an essentially arbitrary manner. Most importantly, it shows that there are many different possible answers – all of them valid - to the question “which university is the best?”, because there are literally millions of possible combinations of rankings depending entirely on which criteria one chooses to judge “quality”. In fact, we at EPI were so impressed, we’ve decided to try something similar.”